Companies operating refineries and petrochemical plants typically face tough challenges in today's environment. These challenges may include increasingly complex technologies, a reduction in workforce experience levels, and constantly changing environmental regulations.
Furthermore, companies seek to continually increase production and efficiency of existing operations. In response, catalyst, adsorbent, equipment, and control system suppliers develop more complex systems that may increase performance. Maintenance and operations of these advanced systems generally requires increased skill levels that may be difficult to develop, maintain, and transfer, given the time pressures and limited resources of today's technical personnel. This means that these increasingly complex systems are not always operated at their highest potential. In addition, when existing assets are operated close to and beyond their design limits, reliability concerns and operational risks may increase.
Plant operators typically respond to these challenges with one or more strategies, such as, for example, availability risk reduction, working the value chain, and continuous optimization. Availability risk reduction generally places an emphasis on achieving adequate plant operations as opposed to maximizing performance. Working the value chain typically places an emphasis on improving the match of feed and product mix with operational capabilities and other demands. Continuous optimization often employs tools, systems, and models to continuously monitor and bridge gaps in plant performance.
There are multiple levels of gaps (or performance deficits) that refinery operators typically experience:
1) Events or “Lost Opportunities” Gap
Most refinery operators may sufficiently track the results of unplanned events in their refineries: unplanned shutdowns, equipment availability problems, or the like. The impact associated with these gaps may be large, but the duration is normally short. Well-operated refineries may keep these events to a minimum through effective process and mechanical reliability programs.
2) Backcasting Gap
Some refineries focus on a backcasting (historical) gap in which the operator compares the monthly refinery production plan against the actual achieved operations, and conducts an analysis to understand and resolve the cause(s) for any gap(s). This is typically done on a monthly basis. Refinery operators may often uncover substantial improvement if they resolve the root causes for deviation from refinery production process plans.
But when root causes are embedded in poor process performance, they are often difficult to identify. This historical backcasting analysis also may be costly, in that it leaves issues unidentified and un-resolved until the end of the month. Early identification of this gap and resolution of the problems may avoid significant losses. It is important to maintain continuous and consistent levels of desired performance when optimizing a particular process based on various plant process models to ensure consistent and viable results.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved, automated tuning system that utilizes a strategy of optimization that employs tools, systems, and models to enable operators to monitor and successfully bridge the gaps in plant performance.